in it--no small merit
now-a-days. His versification is generally harmonious, and he displays
a fair command of metre. Sometimes he takes a fancy to an obsolete
or out-of-the-way stanza; one of his longest and best poems, _The
Skeleton in Armor_, is exactly in the measure of Drayton's fine
ballad on Agincourt. His chief fault is an over-fondness for simile
and metaphor. He seems to think indispensable the introduction into
everything he writes of a certain (or sometimes a very uncertain)
number of these figures. Accordingly his poems are crowded with
comparisons, sometimes very pretty and pleasing, at others so
far-fetched that the string of tortured images which lead off Alfred
de Musset's bizarre _Ode to the Moon_ can hardly equal them. This
_making figures_ (whether from any connection with the calculating
habits of the people or not) is a terrible propensity of American
writers, whether of prose or verse. Their orators are especial sinners
in this respect. We have seen speeches stuck as full of metaphors
(more or less mixed) as Burton's _Anatomy_ is of quotations.

"Such persons as know from experience that literary people are not
always in private life what their writings would betoken, that
Miss Bunions do not precisely resemble March violets, and mourners
upon paper may be laughers over mahogany--such persons will not be
surprised to hear that the Longfellow is a very jolly fellow, a lover
of fun and good dinners, and of an amiability and personal popularity
that have aided not a little the popularity of his writings in
verse and prose--for he writes prose too, prettier, quainter, more
figurative, and more poetic if anything, than his poetry. He is also a
professor at Harvard College, near Boston.

"EDGAR A. POE, like Longfellow and most of the other American poets,
wrote prose as well as poetry, having produced a number of wild,
grotesque, and powerfully-imagined tales; unlike most of them he was
a literary man _pur sang_. He depended for support entirely on his
writings, and his career was more like the precarious existence of
an author in the time of Johnson and Savage than the decent life of
an author in our own day. He was a Southerner by birth, acquired a
liberal education, and what the French call 'expansive' tastes, was
adopted by a rich relative, quarreled with him, married 'for love,'
and lived by editing magazines in Richmond, Philadelphia, and New
York; by delivering lectures (the never-failing last